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Re: Jobs (Steve), advertising, and beta testing
Damn, buddy, were you at Macworld, too? I was covering it for the Seattle Times. Sorry I didn't bump into you. Many many responses to what you wrote, but first of all. Online advertising is in the billions of dollars. Yes, billions. All reports say so. Let's hope they're not lying. As bad as it might be, as poorly as it might work, it's now a true force to be reckoned with. I don't get why they want low-response rate branding, but there you go. I met with Google during my SF trip as background for future articles. They expect to turn a profit in 2001. Their VCs love them. They don't like graphics or ads. I saw many things that would make your hair stand up like a fretted porpentine, I think the phrase goes. Jobs didn't say 70,000 beta testers. He said 70,000 reports. Which, knowing some beta testers, this could have been 1,000 reports from 70 people. Further, Apple has recently answered many complaints about its soi disant Open Source license by revising it to conform to most critics desired changes. Which marks the first time I can think of that Apple changed a policy or licensing issue in favor of developers. On the burning DVD issues, the industry doesn't so much care that you burn them as it cares that you can't dupe the discs. Blank DVD media apparently has what's called a "pre-embossed area" which are bad sectors that prevent the copy-protection stuff from being copied bit-for-bit. This means that you can't just plop a disc in and copy it off. You could, of course, read in a DVD movie via analog output from the DVD player through a FireWire compatible analog-to-digital converter (I read about one today that's about $300). So you get some noise, some loss of quality. Then, it takes you 2x to write out the disc based on input. So you digitize something like several gigabytes of data, and then you spend four hours writing a two hour film. You can see why the movie industry isn't exactly quaking in its boots about this kind of technology. The video CDs that have been available in Asia for some years now are a better solution for pirates. You can press them or dupe them quickly, the quality is about VCR (but it doesn't get worse) and the players are cheap. My acunupuncturist has family in Shanghai, where he's from originally, and after a recent trip was telling me how the players run about US$50 and discs of new films are US$1 or so apiece. Part of the joy of the vision Jobs describes, by the way, has for me to do with the utility of using any computer as a seamless device. For instance, right now, the combination of software, hardware, and cables to get photos off a digital camera is just offensive. Imagine an 802.11b (AirPort wireless networking) equpped digital camera and computer. You have a daemon running on your Mac that's triggered by the camera sending a "hi, I'm there signal" when it's near. Based on your preferences, the computer transfers all the images from the camera, writes them to a CD (and prompts you to insert one), and deletes them off the camera. Wouldn't that be slicker 'n snot? It's possible. It's not even 2 years out. They need to make the 802.11b chipset small and cheap. I saw a HomeRF chipset that fits into the Compact Flash form and power factor during Macworld. That's a competing technology, but think of Bluetooth or any wireless tech that can deliver more than 1 Mbps, and you have a solution for MP3 players, digital cameras, PDAs, etc., where your preferences on the computer control your data flow. The computer becomes a pull device, or the handhelds and remotes become push devices. That was the big deal for me with iTunes - it's not so much that it's simple or whatever. It's that it integrates lots of different activities that are conceptually the same thing: moving music around. This is very very cool. Remember the old days? They would have given us a file transfer dialog box with local files on one side and remote files on the other. Apple shot us full of those in the old days. Timbuktu Pro, for being such a fantastic tool for me, still uses that tedious approach for file exchange. Why not mount a fake server on the desktop? I dunno. Too much work, I guess. Rant over.
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